Arethusa would smile at her marks when she saw them in the bedroom mirror, ruled straight and neat across her bottom. 

This was a punishment for untidiness, that had meant she’d lost all her university assignment materials, so that she was already late with an essay before she’d started it. So we searched her bedroom, and finally found the papers among stacks of paper concerning other things.

So she did the essay first, with me helping on the appendices. Then she tidied her room, with her Master watching her, cane in hand.

Then, and only then, she could bend over and receive the punishment that had been hanging over her for about a day and a half. 

It was one of her more severe lessons. I’d worked up a steam of righteous masterly wrath. But the harshest thing, in a way, was my making the marks deliberately messy. No tidy collection of lines. When she looked at them in the mirror, they reminded her of the consequences of messiness. 

(But when you have a Master, loving but with a taste for giving her stripes and tears, and a masochistic slavegirl, can you stop her caning from being sexy? No, it turned out we couldn’t. Worthy experiment, though.)